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Tuesday, December 9, 2014

The Study

We moved into our current apartment last
May. One of its appealing features was a spare room that has become the study.
Most of my books on philosophy and theory are stashed in here. Fiction,
baseball, art history, and, until two days ago, animal rights—all of these
subjects are filed in the living room. To the center-right of my desk, I can
reach the Rancière shelf. Below it is the shelf of various secondary sources.
Below that: Jean-Luc Nancy, Derrida, Bataille, Blanchot. The top shelf:
Vonnegut. To my immediate right, the top two shelves hold existentialism, the
middle two the Frankfurt School (including Benjamin and his Gesammelte Schriften) and select titles
by Badiou, below that, Nietzsche and, as of last week, the Oxford King James
Version of the Bible. The Nietzsche section seemed like the right place for the
KJV. Some day, a publisher will bundle the Bible with Beyond Good and Evil/On the
Genealogy of Morality.

I wrote almost all of what became Part II
of Egalitarian Moments in the study. The
placement of Rancière, Benjamin, or Badiou to my right isn’t some kind of
ironic political statement, but rather done out of necessity. The shelves to my
left are out of arm’s reach when I sit at the desk. My primary sources needed
to be closer than that. Near the end, I had the last few titles I needed
stacked on the desk. More Deleuze than I’d like to admit. Books by Oliver Davis
and Samuel Chambers, Aisthesis in
English and French, The Emancipated
Spectator. While writing the conclusion, I’d repeatedly pull down Disagreement/La mésentente (it’s important to check both when citing passages
from the English translation for reasons that Chambers elaborates at 91ff),
although each time I’d return them to the shelf on the basis of the obstinate
belief that I had covered that text in the Introduction and Part I.

At some point, sundry items and all types
of paperwork began to pile into the study. There aren’t only books to my right.
There’s a pile of (in this case, more than two) guitars in cases, as well as
several boxes of music equipment and electronics that I’ve basically ignored
since we moved. When it got cooler during the fall, I added to my left the fan
we no longer needed in the living room and piled every single last piece of
paper on top of my filing bins. That pile included a few bills (since paid) and
a variety of drafts of the book stacked in increasing disarray. When it got
tenuous, the paperwork commandeered the left side of the desk. Books claimed
the right. When I typed, my elbows touched both borders. But the book is due soon, I’d think, and I could ignore what
amounted to a highly organized disorder. Did I mention that the desk also had
the printer, a cactus, a Boss DS-1 distortion pedal and a Dan-Echo? What
exactly were those doing there? Thankfully there’s a booze cart
for the whiskey, because it would be tempting to drink to make space. Which
means that there would be space to write without the necessary focus to do so.
Few of us mere mortals could do with philosophy what Hunter S. Thompson did
with journalism.

This is the point in the narrative where
everything teetering is supposed to topple. I’m faced with the thankless task
of reporting otherwise. I submitted the manuscript and, after a week of
procrastinating, I finally filed or recycled almost all the paperwork.

I did try out a few alternate endings. In
one scenario, I fell into what 19th century authors called
dissipation, and used politically expedient broadsides to finance my debts from
debauchery and gambling. However, Balzac wrote that one, unless it involved a
portrait of rake that remained hidden through most of the narrative. That story
is by Oscar Wilde.

In a different scenario, I will have been
found four decades later, mummified beneath hundreds of drafts of my magnum
opus. I’m pretty sure that’s what happened to Wittgenstein.

In the current scenario, the moment during
which I’m typing this piece, the same cat who obstructed my review of Diagne’s African Art as Philosophy and who napped on Descartes’s Philosophical Writings
and Sartre’s Critiques littéraires is
laying on my left arm, pinning my wrist against keyboard. That means that there
must be more room on the desk.

At the moment, the quandary revolves around
reorganizing the books to my right. I’ve read numerous authors describe their
writing techniques: how many words to write per day, strategies for note-taking
and revisions, daily schedules, and reflections on organizing material (Stuart Elden, for instance, is assiduous in his reports on his Foucault project). When I write, these
techniques and strategies change. I hand write most of my material before
typing, or at least I used to. That meant that everything I type is a second
draft. At points, during Part II, this became counter-productive, so I had to type
the first draft and revise later. At one point I was cutting and pasting drafts. With scissors and tape. While all these aspects were open to change,
the shelving of primary sources remained the same. Now that the book is done,
this shelving isn’t as convenient. For example, it might be a while before I
revisit Walter Benjamin’s work, so it probably shouldn’t occupy the shelf to my
direct right—though it was useful for an important part of Chapter 3. Nor do I
really need the rest of the Frankfurt School or Badiou on the shelf below.

There’s no moral to this story. That’s where
this was supposed to be heading. However, aside from an essay on the
anthropocentricism of Schelling’s nature-philosophy, I don’t have any writing
commitments for 2015. Yet. That means I don't have a clear idea about how to reorganize the shelves. Perhaps that is part of the writing process. That
is, not writing is part of the writing process. I have a few rudimentary ideas
about an essay on Rancière and Jean-Luc Nancy, and a more unconventional essay
on humanism, but it’s probably more important, given that I’m less than two
weeks removed from submitting the manuscript for Egalitarian Moments, to spend some time wasting time.

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The Notes Taken

The Notes Taken is a collaborative blog dedicated to book reviews and occasional rants. We would like to present an informal venue to discuss and debate recent, and sometimes not so recent, literature in philosophy, politics, and fiction.